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Teaching Art History and Search Engines

The Internet is truly similar to “Indra’s Net” the ancient Hindu image of
everything being reflected in all other things. The potential of the
Internet is to engage students, not so much in the technology, but rather in
the way students can quickly and efficiently discover the ways topics of
interest and curiosity are linked together for them. The basic search for
information is solved; the Internet provides a nearly endless supply of
facts and trivia. The teachers’ task is to guide the students to relevant
and interesting connections and interpretations of this information. The
teacher’s leadership role in using the Internet for research is suggesting
potentially fruitful avenues of research. It is precisely the experience and
insights that the educator brings that can provide structure to the
otherwise chaotic world of the web.

The Internet connects everything to everything else. Art connects to
history, to science, to philosophy and to literature. To teach art history
using the Internet is to teach all of the subjects one can imagine in the
way these subjects intersect and enlighten the understanding of art. Most
important is to teach critical thinking and to look for unusual connections
and the unexpected. These unusual connections are precisely the subjects
that can “Catch” the students mind and act as motivation to delve deeper
into the subject matter.

Separate but equally important is guiding the student to question the
materials they discover on the Internet. Anyone with access to a computer
can post any opinion, fantasy or delusion on the Web. Most word processing
applications allow documents to become HTML with a single keystroke.
Students should confirm each piece of information from several independent
sources to be certain of the veracity and, even then, consider the fact
against what they know to be true. These kinds of critical thinking skills
may be the most valuable ability to come out of these exercises.

I would love to be able to list a series of web sites that would give
fruitful avenues for the student to explore. These web sites do not exist.
The teachers’ leadership is necessary precisely because the permutations of
the ways art connects with other subjects are infinite. One can, for
example, type in virtually any combination of words and names into a search
engine and generate pages, (“Leonardo Da Vinci” and “Skateboards” anyone?)

I would predict that your students are very familiar with using the Internet
for research. No doubt they’ve been typing key words into search engines and
cutting and pasting out of the results to prepare reports and do their
homework for years. Little effort need be expended teaching students to use
their computers or “surf the net”.

So how to use our educations and our experience reading books and pursuing
subjects of personal interest to make the subjects relevant to students. I
can only provide examples and hope that these examples will inspire an
approach that can be adapted to each teacher’s classroom realities and
teaching philosophy.

Fashion is art, and in the schools today, as it has been for many years,
fashion has also been identified with youth rebellion. Today that rebellion
manifests in Goth and Hip-Hop fashions, among others. We know that following
the break down of authority and social order following the tragedy of the
First World War, young people no longer felt bound by convention. Type
“Short Skirts” and “1918” into a search engine and one discovers that an
Italian earthquake in 1918 was blamed by the clergy on the new fashion of
short skirts. Trivia, of course, but it involves the student in critical
thinking and interests them in the material. Flappers in the 1920’s? Women
refused to wear their hair up and allowed their long hair to flap about.
This can begin students in an exercise that will reveal the history of
fashion in rebellion and a review of the manifestations of this rebellion in
“wearable art” through the present day.

There is a tremendous amount of information in the Internet that the amount
itself can be intimidating. For example; type “Man Ray” into a search engine
and find 5 million pages to reference, many of them, no doubt, with little
relevance to the American Surrealist photographer. The only person qualified
to move the student in a direction that will be rich in possibility of
discovery is the art teacher. Add “Andre Breton”, the poet that founded the
Surrealist movement, to the search and the search is now limited to 6,000
pages. Most interesting is adding “Freud” and “Influence” to the search. Now
less than 400 pages result from the search and you have a subject that may
engage many students; the influence of theories about the human subconscious
in the expression of the Surrealist school of visual art and literature.

The opportunities are endless. Other examples include:
* “TheTheory of Relativity” and “Picasso” to discover the influence
ofEinstein’s understanding of time to Cubist art.
* “Lewis& Clark” and “Watercolors” to discover the rich collection of
artcreated by the expedition and how this art was the means in which
theunexplored continent was first presented to Americans.

Favorite Search Engines:
http://clusty.com Excellent for clustering similar items together, excellent for researching as it combines items with the relationships your looking for, for you.
http://www.teoma.com A favorite of mine as it emphasizes expert references, helps filter out much of the nonsense that exists on the web.
http://www.google.com Still the best general purpose web search engine.
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